Interactive ISS Hologram
Description:
This interactive hologram was made using Unity for the visuals and input handling, a Leap Motion controller for gathering hand tracking information that was then fed into Unity, and a Dreamoc (the glass pyramid that uses reflection to create a free floating image). It was on display at NASA’s booth at the 2018 SpaceCom business convention in Houston, Texas.
My Role:
I was the solo developer on this project. Our NASA client had brought this Dreamoc display (the hologram display) to us and wanted us to create something cool, accessible, and unique with it so they could show it off at the SpaceCom aerospace business conference.
They really wanted it to be interactive, which gave us the idea to incorporate hand tracking. I had never made anything with hand tracking before, so it was a really cool learning experience. I enjoyed having to figure out how to take the input from the Leap Motion camera and look for specific hand gestures and movements and then use that data to interact with objects in the Unity scene.
I had never worked with a Dreamoc display either. The Dreamoc works by having a TV on top of the display facing down into a glass pyramid. The glass pyramid is coated with a special film that reflects the TV’s image into the pyramid, creating a free floating image inside the glass pyramid. The glass pyramid of the Dreamoc has three sides, which means it has three different reflections (one on each side). So it took a fancy camera set up in Unity to display a different view of the same on each side of the pyramid without bleeding from one side of the pyramid to another. It was a fun problem to overcome.
Our client loved the final product and couldn’t wait to show it off at the convention. They even invited me to the two day event to support the display. I got to show off the display to a lot of people during the event. The display was even recorded by a local news station and I was interviewed by a radio station.